This may become a
common company policy,
considering a recent ruling
by the Ninth Circuit Court
of Appeals in Zetwick v. the
County of Yolo (Calif.). The
court reversed a judgment in
favor of the defendants and
remanded the case for trial
next year.

The plaintiff in this case—Victoria Zetwick, a formersergeant at the county jail—alleged the county sheriff,Edward Prieto, subjected herto more than 100 unwelcomehugs and at least one kissbetween 1999 and 2011, whichcreated a sexually hostile workenvironment. In 2012, she filedsuit against the County of Yoloand Prieto, asserting claims ofAct of 1964 and sexualharassment in violationof the California FairEmployment andHousing Act.

Initially, thedistrict court sidedin favor of the county,But that was “an incorrectlegal standard,” says Griffin,adding that the sheriff’s conducthad to be severe or pervasive,not both.

He says the Ninth Circuitbased its reversal on severalfactors: the totality of all thefacts and circumstances werenot considered; more weightshould have been givento the fact that the allegedharasser—the sheriff—washer superior; that the districtcourt can’t quantify howmany hugs create a hostileenvironment; and that afterthe sheriff learned of a secondcomplaint and was told bylegal or HR to stop huggingemployees, he still huggedZetwick roughly six weekslater.

“If I was advising HRleaders, I would say create azero tolerance policy that’svery simple—no hugging inthe workplace,” says Griffin,adding that employees can stillshake hands or possibly fistbump each other. “It’s betterto have a policy that you canmanage than not have a policyand be sued.”Others believe the NinthCircuit’s decision pushes theboundary as to what types ofcases warrant a jury trial andignores social norms of sociallyacceptable behavior. Amongthese experts is Aaron Goldstein,an attorney in the labor andemployment group at Dorsey& Whitney, a Seattle-basedinternational law firm.

“Most people would say
giving someone a hug once
a month...is in the realm of
being socially acceptable,” he
says. But HR departments
should make sure employees
realize that the legal boundary
“is low.”

—Carol Patton

Facebook’s BoldMove

Facebook’s recently announced job-posting service is attracting
a lot of attention. Many
pundits have said it’s a
threat to LinkedIn, given
the sheer number of
Facebook users (nearly
2 billion worldwide)
compared to LinkedIn’s

467 million users.

Soon it will be Facebook,and not Microsoft-ownedLinkedIn, that recruiters willturn to first when it comes tofinding talent, they predict.Facebook’s deep pockets andsheer size of its membershipLinkedIn, although LinkedInwill have access to its newparent company’s vastresources. Facebook claims that itsservice will better enablecompanies to find sought-after passive candidates.

“Two-thirds of jobseekers are alreadyemployed,” AndrewBosworth, Facebook’s vicepresident of ads and businessplatform, told TechCrunch.“They’re not spending theirdays and nights out thereOr are they? Talentmanagement expertJohn Sullivan, professorof management at SanFrancisco State University, isskeptical whether Facebookwill emerge as a major newrecruitment platform.

Sullivan, who describes
Facebook’s new service as
“children playing in an adult’s
space,” says the social-media
network simply isn’t taken
seriously enough by most
people as a place to find a job
and most likely never will be.

“My guess is thatFacebook’s service is goingto end up in also-ran land,” hesays. “When people look fora job, they want to do so on aserious platform.”Furthermore, he adds,recruiters may see little valuein the information that’savailable on Facebook.

—Andrew R. McIlvaine

Little Movement on Maternity LeaveDespite a host of factors that would suggest otherwise, the number of U.S. women taking maternity leave has changed very little in the lasttwo-plus decades.

So says new research from Ohio State University, which finds
that, on average, roughly 273,000 women in the United States
took maternity leave each month between the years 1994 and
2015, with no trend upward or downward.

In addition, the study—based on data culled from theCurrent Population Survey, a monthly poll conducted bythe U.S. Census Bureau—found that most women takingmaternity leave were not paid. Less than half ( 48 percent) werecompensated for leave in 2015. And, paid maternity leave isincreasing, but only at a rate of less than one percentage pointper year, according to study author JayZagorsky, a research scientist at OSU’sCenter for Human Resource Research.In the 22-year span that Zagorskystudied, the U.S. economy has grownby more than 60 percent. In addition,three states—California, NewJersey and Rhode Island—haveimplemented paid family leavelegislation, with a handful of otherstates expanding family leave availabilityover that time. Given such factors, Zagorskyexpected to see some kind of meaningful spike in the number ofwomen taking maternity leave.

There could be a variety of reasons why he didn’t.

In some cases, expecting parents simply might not be aware
of the parental leave afforded to them once they’ve welcomed a
baby into their home, says Brenna Haviland Shebel, director of
healthcare cost and delivery at the Washington-based National
Business Group on Health.

“For example, a company might not offer a formal parental-leave benefit,” says Shebel, “but the employee could take unpaidleave under the Family Medical Leave Act.”And, even when paid leave is an option, financial concernsmight leave some workers hesitant to take advantage of it,she says. “Maternity leave typically pays out a percentage ofan employee’s earnings, whether a graduated amount or a flatamount, through the entire leave period. Some employees areunable to shoulder the financial burden of taking a 40-percentpay cut.”In summarizing the study’s findings, Zagorsky says theresults of his research “suggest [U.S. employers] have along way to go to catch up with the rest of the world as far asproviding for new mothers and their children.” There are steps that employers and HR can take, however, toget the needle moving in the right direction.

“Expand the definition of parent,” says Shebel. “This will shiftthe culture of ‘only certain moms take leave’ to the expectationthat all parents should take leave. Employers that have madethe cultural shift have greater overall success in leave rates.”She also advises creating affinity groups for new andexpecting parents to help promote the availability of programssuch as maternity and parental leave.

Further, companies taking a paid-leave approach “have seen
no [changes] or only positive changes in profitability, turnover
and morale,” says Shebel, noting that “there are several studies
showing that women who go on paid maternity leave are more
likely to return to work.”